Fred Hoyle, 86, astrophysicist and science fiction writer

Walter Sullivan, New York Times

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, August 23, 2001

Fred Hoyle, one of the most creative and provocative astrophysicists of the last half century, who helped explain how the heavier elements were formed and gave the name Big Bang, meant to be derisive, to the theory of cosmic origin he vehemently opposed, died on Monday in Bournemouth, England. He was 86 and lived in Bournemouth.

He suffered a severe stroke last month and never recovered, said Geoffrey Burbidge, an astrophysicist at the University of California at San Diego, who had collaborated with Mr. Hoyle on many research projects.

"Fred was probably the most creative and original person in astrophysics after World War II," Burbidge said.

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Virginia Trimble, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Irvine, said that Mr. Hoyle's opposition to the Big Bang, while considered a mistake, "was significant in that it went a long way toward making cosmology a true science" in which competing theories were tested by observations.

A versatile scientist brimming with ideas and a lifelong rebel eager for intellectual combat, Mr. Hoyle was most widely known as an author, in 1948, of the cosmological theory, which now has few adherents, that the universe exists in a steady state.

In a series of popular radio talks in Britain in the 1940s, he coined "Big Bang" to ridicule the rival concept of an explosive origin of the universe, but the term is now widely used, and the theory is generally accepted.

A historic development in astrophysics was explaining how the elements came to be synthesized step by step in the stars, starting from hydrogen and helium.

In the 1930s, Hans Bethe and others showed how stars could derive their energy from the fusion of hydrogen nuclei (protons) to form helium.

The problem Mr. Hoyle and colleagues faced was how slightly larger elements like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen were formed by stars. An element called beryllium-8, which was an intermediate stage in the process of element formation, stood in the way. It did not survive long enough for the fusion process to reach carbon-12, the next stage in the element building process.

Mr. Hoyle solved the problem: He pressed nuclear physicists to look for a special state of carbon-12 that was stable enough for the fusion of heavier elements to occur.

Then, with three other scientists, Mr. Hoyle figured out how all the heavier elements could have been formed.

Last year, along with Burbidge and Jayant V. Narliker, Mr. Hoyle renewed the fight against Big Bang orthodoxy with the book "A Different Approach to Cosmology."

Mr. Hoyle was also a prolific author of science fiction, producing almost one book a year between 1950 and 1990, some written with his son, Geoffrey. Among the best known were "The Black Cloud" (1957) and "Ossian's Ride" (1958).

In recent years he lived in Bournemouth. In addition to his son, also of Bournemouth, he is survived by his wife, the former Barbara Clark, whom he married in 1939, and a daughter, Elizabeth Butler, a London stockbroker.